Breaking Down Boundaries: A Cultural Historical Approach to Studying Blackness as Diasporic Practice Among Afro-Latinxs

• In Event: 43.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 43.077-4 - Woven out of a Thousand Details: Approaching Affective, Racial, and Sociopolitical Boundaries in Educational Research

Abstract

Youth from diasporic communities are in need of equitable and responsive learning environments that recognize and privilege the knowledge and expertise they bring with them into classrooms. This is particularly the case for Puerto Rican youth who have been historically underserved by the U.S. education system and who recently began inundating stateside schools at record numbers as climate refugees, with 24,000 students enrolling between September 2017 and April 2018 alone (Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2018; Nadworny, 2017). This recent Puerto Rican migration is part of the larger New Latino Diaspora––the growing trend of Latinx communities settling outside the traditional cities and towns that have served as Latinx hubs (Murillo & Villenas, 1997); new migration patterns obligate researchers to interrogate the boundaries around the Latinx “category” by considering the role that context and history play in constructing Latinx identities. In particular, research on diasporic transnational Latinx communities has failed to attend to blackness as intricate to Latinx identity formation, excluding Afro-Latinx students and their experiences from the focus of research and educational interventions (Jiménez Román & Flores, 2010; Author, forthcoming).

Towards this end, this paper considers the interconnections of diasporic movement and learning for Afro-Latinx youth. The author recognizes a need for educational research that accounts for the multiple and varied ways in which Afro-Latinx youth exist across time, geographies, and spaces. Using the Afro-Puerto Rican diaspora as an exemplar, this paper proffers Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), notably, critical approaches to CHAT (Engeström, 1991; Gutiérrez, Hunter & Arzubiaga, 2009), as a tool to study blackness as a diasporic practice. Situating an approach to Afro-Latinx communities within a CHAT framework allows us to see regularities in the organization of the daily lives of these communities, as well as variation in how individual youth understand and make sense of the activities in which they participate (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). This paper points to the utility of historicity, multi-sited sensibilities, and repertoires of practice for researchers of diasporas and learning using examples from the Afro-Puerto Rican diaspora to bolster these claims. As a theoretical tool, CHAT allows us to study blackness as an everyday practice of Afro-Latinx diasporic communities, making visible the connections between the community and its members and the reciprocal influence they have on each other (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003).

Consequential educational research must account for the ingenuity of Afro-Latinxs as they navigate and adapt to complex and complicated processes of crossing borders and boundaries. A CHAT framework brings to the fore the unique ways that learning occurs in the everyday practices of Afro-Latinxs moving and being in diaspora (Butler, 2001). By focusing on blackness as a practice, we can empirically and comparatively consider the existence of multiple Afro-Latinx identities, breaking down the boundaries between blackness and Latinidad, highlighting the various ways that blackness and Latinidad come together in the lived experiences of Afro-Latinx youth. This will lead to better understandings of how blackness as a practice intersects with learning, allowing us to transform educational activity systems for Afro-Latinx students and design for possible Afro-positive futures.

Author

• Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley